Russell and Sylvia Bartley addressed the second of two memos to the Board of Supervisors late last month stating the board had failed to respond to serious issues they raised based on their many years of hands-on involvement in the curation of the museum’s records and its archival holdings.

The Bartleys’ contract has been suspended by the county after county CEO Carmel Angelo and Deputy CEO Janelle Rau started to probe into the museum finances and accounting practices.

Angelo said the investigation started after she received a phone call last June from a museum employee who was extremely concerned with the doings at the museum and what the staff perceived as lack of leadership. She said the employee was very concerned, so much so that he/she stated staff could not even determine a schedule at the museum, and could not say who was supposed to be working when.

Angelo categorized the state of the museum at that time as “a total ship without a rudder.”

According to Angelo, within a period of 24 hours, she, along with Rau and the county’s Human Resources director, met with the museum staff.

“The reason that as CEO of this county I got involved at a very intimate level with the museum was because of a complaint I received,” she said. “Whenever I receive a complaint, no matter who calls, no matter what the complaint, if it has to do with a county office or a county service, I will get to it.”

Angelo said county officials learned museum Director Alison Glassey had not been there in more than a week and that over the course of the last couple of years she had not been showing up to work on a daily basis. Additionally, they learned the staff was very concerned with a lack of leadership at the museum.

Glassey said she had been in poor health and decided to put in for retirement at the end of August last year after being out on medical leave.

“It was something that I needed to do to get healthy,” she said, adding working full-time wasn’t compatible with her trying to recover.

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The county then developed a structure putting Chief Librarian Karen Horner in charge of the museum on a day-to-day basis, Angelo said.

Rau said both administratively and in the actual condition of the museum, the facility was in disarray.

“You had artifacts mixed with props, mixed with canopies,” she said. “There was no structure and there was also no operational structure.”

Angelo added the county had to ensure tasks like paying bills and payroll were done in accordance with government mandates.

In addition to a lack of administrative oversight, the county’s assessment of the museum showed there was a lack of clear accountability.

According to Angelo, there was money that was not actually documented appropriately and officials found small amounts of money and no tracking of where that money came from and where it should have been placed.

“What we learned in this process was that there were some intermingling of county services, staff, dollars and functions between the county museum and the museum nonprofit,” Angelo said. “That was something we were very concerned about and wanted to immediately clean that up. So we ordered a forensic audit to look at every dime that went to the museum to make sure it was appropriately expended.”

County officials said they reached out to the nonprofit board by phone and talked with board Chairman Alan Falleri. Angelo said they had hoped that they would be meeting with the nonprofit board but have yet to do so.

Falleri, a retired community development director and Willits resident, failed to return calls seeking comments on the operations of the nonprofit board.

Additionally, Rau said there was no operational structure or oversight of contractors coming and going as they pleased, including the Bartleys.

Contractual obligations

Under contract by the county since 2007, the Bartleys’ agreement was suspended when county officials started to question the couple’s direct contribution to the county’s facility.

Angelo said the Bartleys have received more than $127,000 in general funds from the county for activities to support the museum, but officials are still looking for the “deliverables” from contracts dating back to when they were put in charge of archiving records more than a decade ago.

“The Bartleys have a lot to lose; $127,000 is a lot of money,” Angelo said. “They had a nice contract with the county year after year. We’ve stopped that contract as we look for the deliverables.”

Rau said the county is looking for oversight and verification of approvals for the work they performed.

“From a contractual standpoint with the archivists that we had there, I am not certain who was directing their work and whether or not it was focused on the county and county artifacts and history, and in the county’s interest,” she said.

The Bartleys have countered that they take exception to comments county officials recently made to the Willits News, which they categorized as “a transparent public relations response which ignores the basic administrative and operational problems facing the museum.”

Communication breakdown

It is not clear whether the investigation on the intermingling of funds between the nonprofit started by Glassey and the county’s general fund has been concluded, but according to Angelo, after the county put Horner in charge of the day-to-day operations of the museum prior to Glassey’s retirement in August, the county attempted to reach the chairman of the museum advisory board, Jim Eddie, without success.

During her report to the Willits City Council last month, Willits representative Saprina Rodriguez said she was concerned over the lack of communication between the county and the museum’s advisory board.

“There was never any intention to withhold information from the museum advisory board,” Angelo said, “Had we been able to have people answer their phones, they would have heard what was happening.”

In the Bartleys’ first memo to the Board of Supervisors and the county, dated Dec. 1, 2017, the contractors wrote that following the granting of their most recent contracts for their archival and research services by the Executive Office on June 22, county officials allegedly notified Glassey they were placing her on administrative leave for alleged mishandling of museum finances.

The Bartleys said that during the entire time they worked under contract for the county, they submitted invoices documenting their scope of work. Even though they were given a contract for two years renewable for a third to continue their work, the Bartleys said it was suspended with no further communication from county officials. “They never talked to us,” Russell Bartley said.

Gag order rumors

The Bartleys’ December memo alleges county officials imposed a “gag order” on the museum’s staff following Glassey’s departure.

Eddie said this week he tried to reach out to the museum staff over the summer to inquire about Glassey’s departure but was told they “were all sworn to secrecy.”

Other staff members speaking under promise of anonymity have subsequently said the museum’s advisory board had not met since Glassey “was asked to leave,” but Horner countered that there was no official gag order in place and that as far as she knows, Glassey was never placed on administrative leave.

Angelo said there is no connection between the investigation into the museum’s finances launched by county officials and the former director’s subsequent retirement.

Speaking about the two-month gap between the county’s initial meeting with museum staff and Glassey’s retirement announcement in August, Horner said staff had to be careful about what they communicated to the public.

“There were things we could not say then because (before she retired) she (Glassey) was officially still the museum’s director,” she said. “We didn’t want to talk about a personal issue. Our focus now is to make the museum better and we want the museum to prosper.”

Horner said even though things have been neglected and haven’t been done correctly in the past, as acting director, she wants to make sure the museum runs professionally with input from the public.

“We are all about transparency,” she said.

Projects outside of museum’s core

The highly popular and successful County Museum Road Show announced recently it would be taking a break from its four-year run during 2018, but Artistic Director Linda Pack said that decision was independent of the transitional period the museum is currently undergoing.

Although she stressed the Road Show was a project started during Glassey’s tenure as museum director, it is a separate entity from the museum.

Pack said she did not know if the Road Show was a financial success because she was not in charge of that part of the project, but Rau said a lot of the activities that were basically outside of the museum core service cost the general fund. She said projects initiated during Glassey’s leadership, like the Kinetic Carnivale and the Mushroom Wine and Beer event, were not profit-making activities for the museum and cost the general fund.

Moving forward

Although the museum’s advisory board has not met since late last year, a previously canceled meeting has been rescheduled for Monday at 10 a.m. and 1st District Supervisor Carre Brown plans to attend.

Brown said it was her uncle who originally drew up the plans for the museum and added her family belongs to the county Historical Society. She also noted Eddie was her appointment to the museum’s advisory board.

“My board has tasked me with being their ambassador,” she said. “And to say to the museum staff, ‘You have not been forgotten.’”

The Bartleys wrote in their latest memo to the Board of Supervisors and the county that their aim is for proper oversight as well.

“Our purpose is simply to bring sufficient order to the Museum’s archival holdings, with the requisite collection inventories, established accessions priorities and developed administrative policies, so that an experienced archivist can then take charge of those holdings and effectively manage them into the future,” they wrote.

Although the Bartleys’ contracts remain in limbo, they have advised the county they plan to recover “significant historical materials” they contributed to the musuem’s archival holdings, in the event the county decides against honoring their contractual agreement.